Editorial: To sleep, perchance to stay healthy

Vancouver Sun05.02.2012

Imagine medical research linked a particular food with all of the following: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, some forms of cancer, depression, decreased immunity to bacteria and viruses, lower IQ, problems with focusing, learning and concentrating, and a decrease in alertness, leading to accidents and injuries.

Imagine medical research linked a particular food with all of the following: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, some forms of cancer, depression, decreased immunity to bacteria and viruses, lower IQ, problems with focusing, learning and concentrating, and a decrease in alertness, leading to accidents and injuries.

One would expect most people would avoid any such food like the plague, while others would call on governments to impose an immediate ban on sales of the product. But, alas, the culprit here is not a food; rather, it’s something that’s even more common than most foods: sleep deprivation.

Indeed, according to a newly released study by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control, fully 30 per cent of American adults — 40.6 million workers — sleep fewer than six hours per day.

According to polls on this side of the border, Canadians don’t fare much better: An oft-cited 2007 poll conducted by Environics Research found that 23 per cent of Canadians are clinically sleep deprived, and often fall asleep while reading, or while in a theatre or a car. According to a 2011 poll conducted by Leger Marketing for CBC News, about six in 10 Canadians reported getting less than the required six to eight hours sleep a night, with 58 per cent saying they often feel tired.

This clearly takes its toll on the sleep deprived, though not only on them. Rather, given the health problems, loss of productivity and increase in accidents associated with sleep deprivation, the Canadian economy is also likely being hit hard by the epidemic of sleep deprived workers.

This is more than a little ironic since the epidemic is at least partly the result of our constantly on, no-downtime, always-wired world. It is no coincidence, after all, that despite — or perhaps because of — all our new technologies, people say they are busier than ever.

When one is always busy, one has little time for sleep. That suggests that to reverse the trend toward lack of sleep, industry itself must make a fundamental change: toward valuing downtime and celebrating those who strike a good work-life balance, rather than only rewarding those who live to work.

It also means that workers themselves must take some control by, for example, emphasizing life away from work.

When it comes to sleep, this means unplugging the mobile phones, BlackBerrys, iPads or whatever else keeps them wired, both literally and figuratively.

But of course sleep deprivation and its causes aren’t unique to the modern world.

People have always been sleep- deprived, and there have always been effective ways of improving sleep.

Many tried and true methods include: going to bed and getting up at the same time each day, including weekends; avoiding large meals, caffeine and alcohol before bed; relaxing before bed and ensuring one’s bedroom is conducive to sleep; keeping a regular exercise schedule, though not before bed; and perhaps most importantly, by not trying too hard to fall asleep — by getting up and doing something to relax if you can’t enter dreamland.

And try to stay unplugged for a few hours at least.

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